Open Letters to Others in Minneapolis Who Should Have an Interest in the Case of the Wretchedly Written Dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams
The open letters covered in this article at
those for people in Minneapolis who should have an interest in the case of the wretchedly
written dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams, including the following.
To get a sense of the contents of these
letters, my letter to Neel Kashkari, Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of
Minneapolis is given; others may be viewed
in the Appendix.
People in
Minneapolis Who Should Have an Interest in the Case of the Wretchedly Written
Dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams
Neel Kashkari, Chair of the Federal Reserve
Bank of Minneapolis
J. Patrick Coolican, Editor-in-Chief, Minnesota
Reformer
Heather Anderson, Executive Director, Advancing
Equity Coalition
Lara Bergman, Minneapolis Public Schools
Parent and Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education District 6 Candidate
(November 2024)
Paula Luxenberg, Minneapolis Public Schools
Parent, Volunteer, and Campaign Manager for Minneapolis Public Schools At-Large
Candidate Joyner (then Sondra) Emerick (November 2022) and
Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education District 6 Candidate Lara
Bergman (November 2024)
…………………………………………………………………………….
An Open Letter to
Neel Kashkari, Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
>>>>> Natalie Rasmussen Must Issue a Public Apology for Having
Served as Chair of the Committee that Passed the Wretchedly Written
Dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams >>>>> The Nature of Genuine
Institutional Change
April 2, 2025
Neel---
Yesterday I sent an email to Natalie Rasmussen
(Chair of the Minnesota State University/Mankato Department of Education;
dissertation adviser and chair of the doctoral committee for Lisa Sayles-Adams)
that began
"You must issue a public apology for
having served as chair of the committee that passed the wretchedly written
dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams."
..............................................................................................
My communications with Rasmussen and others
who should be chagrined for having such a dissertation passed in doctoral
committee at Minnesota State University/Mankato constitute examples of the
activism necessary for achievement of overhaul in public education.
When I sent you a hard copy of the first
edition of my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:
Current Condition, Future Prospect, I commended your expressed interest in
education change but conveyed the message that advocating for a constitutional
amendment mandating high quality public education for all students would be
ineffective and a waste of time.
Attempting to induce change in public
education cannot be achieved with remote maneuvers at the legislative or
constitutional level:
Those in the public education bureaucracy are
highly practiced in evading consequences for violating such mandates; any
change must be done via in-person advocacy and ongoing energetic
activism.
The current situation presents an opportunity
for you to take a public stand, lamenting the circumstance that a dissertation
of the abominable quality produced by Minneapolis Public
Schools Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams could have ever passed in committee
at an institution of purported higher learning.
..............................................................................................
I entered my communication with Rasmussen as
an open letter on my blog ( http://www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com ), and I also entered follow-up
email communications to Minnesota State University/Mankato Assistant
Provost for Research and Dean of tof he Graduate School Pieter de Hart;
and to Minnesota State University/Mankato Dean of the College of Education
Mwarumba Mavita on that blog. I acted in like manner as follow-up to
communications with Minnesota State University/MankatoTeachers of Tomorrow
leaders Kimberly Chavez and Lina Wang; and with Minnesota State University/Mankato
Student Government President President Roshit Niraula and Vice-President
Rebecca Jay. Similarly, I will be entering this email to you on that
platform, with an international viewership that includes nations as far-flung
as Russia, Germany, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Algeria, Singapore,
Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
..............................................................................................
Attached to this email is the March 2025
edition of my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research
from Minneapolis, Minnesota, in which I analyze the dissertation (African
American Women Principals: A Phenomenological Study to Explore Their
Experiences in K-12 Leadership) of Sayles-Adams that astonishingly
passed the committee comprised of Rasmussen as dissertation adviser,
Candace Raskin, and Efe Agbamu.
Sayles-Adams took the highly unusual step of
putting the dissertation on “embargoed” (delayed availability to the public)
status for almost two years after publication. The dissertation became
available in November 2024. I ran a hard copy of the dissertation
(downloaded copy also attached to this email) and read that document
thoroughly, multiple times. This doctoral thesis is a confoundingly
terrible presentation of research, full of misspelled words, word usage errors,
run-on sentences, and awkward syntax. Further, the dissertation is
gravely flawed with regard to structure, presentation of findings, and analysis
of data.
The dissertation that appeared to the public
in November 2024 should have never been approved by the committee.
In my own document, commencing with
“Introductory Comments” and continuing in successive chapters, I provide a
detailed analysis of the above-mentioned flaws and others. In doing so, I
analyze each of the five chapters in the Sayles-Adams dissertation:
Chapter I (along with “Acknowledgments” and “Abstract”), “Background of the
Problem”; Chapter II, “Review of the Literature”; Chapter III,
“Methodology”; Chapter IV, “Findings”; and Chapter V,
“Discussion.”
As of November 2024, continuing into February
2025, the "embargoed" status of the Sayles-Adams’s dissertation ended
and this doctoral thesis was listed on “Cornerstone: A Collection
of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato,” at
link, https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/etds/1266/ .
According to librarians at University of
Minnesota/Mankato, Sayles-Adams withdrew the dissertation from the Cornerstone
listing on 17 February 2025.
Readers of my blog, my Journal of the
K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and
other platforms know that they may go to the above link to observe the current
"withdrawn" status of the dissertation.
The current unavailability of the
Sayles-Adams dissertation induces grave questions as to why Sayles-Adams is
unwilling to submit her dissertation for public review. This runs counter
to the very idea of doctoral dissertations, the purpose of which is to
contribute to the intellectual universe of public knowledge.
.....................................................................................................
Readers of my blog know that in African
American Women Principals: A Phenomenological Study to Explore Their
Experiences in K-12 Leadership, Lisa Sayles-Adams interviews five African
American women school principals with the objective of determining how these
principals coped with the challenges they faced because of their position at
the intersection of race and gender, especially with regard to interactions
with white men.
Sufficiently discerning readers of Lisa
Sayles-Adams’s dissertation will readily observe the many flaws of English
usage, the structural problems of the dissertation, the poorly executed
interviews of the participant principals, the failure to follow up with
questions that could have produced material of considerable value in
understanding the experiences of these women, and the lack of any meaningful
contribution to scholarly literature.
As readers now know, the dissertation is
replete with misspelled and misused words, including a rendering of the word,
tenet, as “tenant” two times; presentation of the word, “rein,” as
reign; and the most brain-boggling of all: the four-times
misspelled pseudonym (“Marica” rather than “Marcia) assigned to one of the five
interviewees participating in this qualitative study; Sayles-Adams also
once renders another pseudonym, Gwendolyn, as “Gwendoly.”
.....................................................................................................
Natalie Rasmussen must issue a public apology
for having served as chair of the committee that passed the wretchedly written
dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams.
If you genuinely care about change in public
education, you also should make a public statement lamenting the bestowal of a
doctorate at Minnesota State University/Mankato on the basis of such an
insubstantial and error-ridden dissertation.
I would think, also, that you would argue for
the dismissal of Natalie Rasmussen as Chair of the Department of Education at
Minnesota State University/Mankato.
One cannot make institutional change of any
kind from afar. Think of the arduous activism of Sojourner Truth,
Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglas,
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Cesar
Chavez, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm.
Institutional change only results from
courageous in-person activism.
Now is your chance.
With best regards,
Gary
Gary Marvin Davison, Ph.D.
Director, New Salem Educational Initiative
2507 Bryant Ave North
Minneapolis MN
55411
http://www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com
Author,
Understanding the Minneapolis Public
Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect (New Salem Educational Initiative,
second edition, 2024
Foundations of an Excellent Liberal Arts
Education (New Salem
Educational Initiative, 2022
A Concise History of African America (Seaburn, 2004)
The State of African Americans in Minnesota
2004 (Minneapolis
Urban League, 2008)
The State of African Americans in Minnesota
2008 (Minneapolis
Urban League, 2004)
Tales from the Taiwanese (Libraries Unlimited, 2004)
A Short History of Taiwan: The Case for
Independence (Praeger, 2003
Culture and Customs of Taiwan ([with Barbara E. Reed]
(Greenwood, 1998)
Agricultural Development and the Fate of
Farmers in Taiwan, 1945-1990 (Minneapolis,
Minnesota: Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1993)
A World History: Links Across Time and
Place ([with six
other authors] (McDougal Littell, 1988)
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